In the lab, the box stood on a metal table.
Elizabeth looked at it closely with her eyebrows drawn together. "Well?"
Nick pointed to the box. "See for yourself."
Elizabeth peered over the edge of the box. Before she knew what she saw, she knew what she smelled.
She saw skin and flesh. And smelled the smell of blood, and the smell of raw flesh.
Not once, but twice. Because in the box were two cut-off human feet.
"I take it these are real?" They had to be real. She had already the blood, that metallic smell that smelled like it tasted and could also be a flavoring, but she feared that the truth was once again worse than hope.
Nick nodded slowly. "Yes. They're real. Just had colleagues look at them."
Elizabeth had to swallow for a moment. It was more common for serial killers to mutilate victims, usually post-mortem, but rarely were the victims' extremities so neatly arranged in a box.
It was as if they were intended as a gift that would give the recipient of that gift nights of nightmares for weeks.
Katherine stepped closer as well. "The wound edges haven't bled in," she murmured. "Even I can see that, although Cuevas should take another look. When we get through here, he can get right on it.
Eli Cuevas was Maggie's chosen assistant to stand in for her while she was away at the morgue, under regular instruction from the redhead via video call.
"Standing foot," Nick said with a wry smile.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "Hilarious, Nick."
Nick continued to grin but then turned serious again. "And that was on top of it." He held a rose in his left hand, over which he wore a glove. A rose that was already a little dried up.
Katherine stepped closer. "Two feet and a rose?" she muttered to herself. "Surely that means something --"
"You mean it's symbolic?" asked Elizabeth, who knew her sister's thought pattern too well.
"The rose has too much symbolic power to be pure coincidence," said the psychiatrist. "Anyway, in such a drastic case."
Nick looked alternately at Elizabeth, Katherine, the box, and the rose in his hand. "Forensics says it's a young girl's feet," he said slowly.
In Elizabeth's mind, the processing machine immediately went on. Just as our brains were programmed to either flee, fight, or play dead in the face of danger, Elizabeth's automatic perpetrator categorization mechanism was fired up within seconds. What kind of perpetrator was this? A ritual killer? An isolated incident? Theft from an OR in the hospital? Necrophilia?
"Was this junkie the killer who also cut off his victim's feet?" asked Elizabeth with a furrowed brow, more to herself than to the others, thinking of the symbolism of the severed limbs combined with the rose and the junkie's desolate condition, which hardly fit the planning of a staged ritual murder. "Was he the murderer ... if it was a murder and not an amputation in a hospital where some nut had stolen surgical remains? Or was the junkie just the messenger?"
Katherine raised her eyebrows briefly. "Well. If they're cut off post-mortem, which I think they are, surgery is out of the question. After all, what surgeon in a hospital cuts off the feet of the dead? Unless he's deranged?"
"All right, but let's leave no stone unturned. Maybe some doctor who does illegal experiments on cadavers?" Elizabeth pressed her lips together for a second. "Anyway, I don't want to be accused by Ma again that we're just following the exotic leads and disregarding the obvious. Will you take care of it with Cuevas and Maggie and check with the hospitals? Better safe than sorry."
Nick nodded in agreement.
Elizabeth's gaze slid over the junkie's clothes, which lay on a second table. In particular, the clunky DocMartens boots jumped out at her, and she put on a latex glove and inspected the boots.
"I think they're too big for the feet," Nick said slowly. "For the ones in the box, anyway."
Elizabeth dropped her shoulders and rolled her eyes one more time. "Very funny!" She turned the boots around. "I can see that myself! Have they been inspected yet?"
Nick pressed his lips together and shook his head. "No, not yet, and we've been looking at the box first."
Katherine stepped closer. There was something splattered up the sides of the boots. Also reddish brown.
"Could that be blood?" asked Elizabeth, brows drawn together. "Possibly even the same one that's on the gloves?" But there was something else. In the grooves of the boots was some whitish-greyish mass. "Look here. I wouldn't say I like this at all. Where's Cuevas?"
Eli Cuevas came into the lab at that moment with a steaming cup of coffee.
Elizabeth looked at him and said without greeting, "This stuff here on the soles," she held out the boot to the young man, who abruptly slowed his steps. "Why don't you put this under a microscope? I have a hunch, or shall we say apprehension, about what this might be."
Cuevas had carefully scraped some of the grayish-white mass from the soles and placed it on the microscope slide for fine-tissue examination. Eli Cuevas's sample on the microscope wasn't as detailed, but it was no less startling because of it.
"Well," Cuevas said, blinking. "This could be brain tissue." He shook his head as if he didn't believe what he saw himself and looked up from the microscope. He also looked at Katherine, who was leaning over the microscope, peering in. Katherine raised her head and just nodded mutely.
"Brain tissue on the boot," Elizabeth muttered, pursing her lips. "That means he must have been pretty bad about it by now. To have brain tissue on his boot --"
"... he must have crushed someone's head." Cuevas nodded slowly.
"And that makes the murder fantasies he was spouting, this impalement thing, maybe not just the sick fantasy of a junkie after all?" Elizabeth looked at Cuevas and Nick.
"Maybe he's planning something new again?" asked Nick with a deep frown.
"For now, he's at Bonnie's ranch or headed there, respectively." Elizabeth pointed to the brain sample. "Cuevas, you should look closer at this with Dr. Ross."
Cuevas nodded and poured a few samples of the whitish substance into a test tube. Paper bags were often used for evidence. Contrary to the usual handling in all crime shows, plastic bags were unsuitable for organic matter because mold could develop in a moist environment. In the paper bag, however, the tissue dried out. Without the DNA being destroyed. Because DNA was only destroyed by mold and UV light, if you wanted a corpse to no longer be identifiable by DNA, you had to put it in a plastic bag and put it in the blazing sun for as long as possible.
Elizabeth stood in front of the box and boots for a while. "If this guy crushed anyone's head, surely he could be trusted to cut off a girl's feet. What do you think?"
Nick and Katherine nodded in agreement.
"So we need a warrant right away. And, as I said, canvass the hospitals to see if there's been an amputation of two feet on a young girl anywhere in the last few weeks. I can't imagine it, but we don't want to leave anything out. And the two of us," she looked at her sister, "should get on this guy as soon as possible. This time at Bonnie's ranch."
Nick scribbled something on his notepad and pulled out his cell phone. "Who would have thought a boring privacy training would end so dramatically?"
"It always helps to expect the worst," Katherine replied with a sigh. "There was a study that said pessimists live longer."
"What does that mean specifically?"
"The optimist enjoys the virtual and suffers in the real when he falls flat on his face. The pessimist suffers in the virtual and enjoys the real when he is then positively surprised. Pessimism helps to avoid unrealistic goals in the first place and thus conserves his strength."
"What would such goals be?" wanted Elizabeth to know.
"World peace, universal love, that sort of thing."
"Isn't pessimism a German invention?" now Nick wanted to know.
"Why yes, from whom else?" Katherine nodded slowly. "Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to use the term."